Edward Hopper

signed in pencil (lower right)

plate: 7 by 9 in. (17.6 by 22.6 cm.)

sheet: 9½ by 11⅝ in. (24 by 28.9 cm.)

At the center of Edward Hopper’s The Monhegan Boat sits a woman. From underneath the hood of her raincoat, she looks up at us with a faint, private smile. Her expression—the only expression visible to us in the scene—pulls us onto the boat. Rather than relegating us to the role of spectator observing a carefully constructed image, Hopper helps us feel the scene’s intensity firsthand. There is an intimacy in meeting eyes with the woman, compounded by Hopper placing our perspective within the confines of the boat's upper deck. A simple depiction of a moment at sea is brought alive by Hopper’s decisions.

Edward Hopper’s The Monhegan Boat, an etching executed in 1919, is one of a number of works Hopper produced in Maine, during a series of summers spent first in Ogunquit and then on Monhegan Island. Hopper is remembered today as one of America’s great 20th century artists, one who carved out his legacy as a realist painter and printmaker, while most of his fellow American artists pursued the avant-garde styles of cubism and surrealism and later, abstraction. His most-celebrated works are those oil paintings that captured the unspoken solitude at the core of the American experience, but it was printmaking upon which Hopper’s career was built. Gail Levin notes that Hopper’s “first public recognition through prizes and critical articles in art journals was for his prints,” which were “of sufficient quality to have assured him a place in American art history even had he not gone on to paint the pictures for which he is so deservedly famous” (Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints, New York, 1979, pp. 3-7).

The Monhegan Boat depicts a group of women huddled on board a boat (our aforementioned conspirator among them), shielding themselves from the cold drizzle with raincoats and hats. In the distance another boat, sails billowing, tilts to its side. But amidst the whirling intensity of both our attraction to the etching and the ocean’s rolling waves, Hopper places a kind of serenity over his characters. They are locals, unbothered by the unpredictability of New England’s element. Hopper, too, was a kind of local. Time spent aboard ferries and sailboats in tumultuous conditions was likely a fixture of his summers in Maine. Indeed Hopper’s brilliance lies in his ability to depict beauty without compromising relatability. Robert Hughes writes that the distance “between Hopper and his apparently aloof, disconnected human subjects… was bridged by an acute feeling of common predicament” (Robert Hughes, “The Realist at the Frontiers”, Time, 1980). 

That common predicament, so often captured by Hopper in his most poignant works, was being American. Whether portraying El Paso motels or Cape Cod beachhouses, Hopper is always in command of the allure of ordinary, American life. Hopper’s prints and their subjects—New England ferries, empty night trains, Midwestern landscapes—are no different. In The Monhegan Boat, Hopper welcomes us into the lives of these ferrygoers and masterfully shows us the inherent adventure in even the most unpleasant of commutes.